OF ALL THE DISCIPLINES in which Sa'adyah excelled, it was in poetry that he worked within the most highly structured frameworks, though here too he brought great originality to his praxis, as we shall see later in the chapter. Medieval Hebrew poetry—and, to some extent, the poetry of late antiquity—is typically classified in contemporary research as either liturgical or secular according to its formal function: poetry intended for use in religious ceremonies (essentially in the obligatory prayers) is classified as piyut or liturgical poetry, while poetry that is not so intended is classified as secular. I will also make use of these categories in describing Sa'adyah's poetic oeuvre, with the reservation that before the end of the first millennium no truly ‘secular’ Hebrew poetry existed in the Orient in terms of atmosphere and content, and the so-called ‘secular’ poetry that Sa'adyah wrote served religious ends, as we shall presently see.

The Foundations of Hebrew Liturgical Poetry

Liturgical poetry as I have defined it was known by various names in earlier sources. Already in rabbinic times, composers of piyut were referred to as paitanim, and in the Middle Ages their poetry was called ḥazanut or hazana (in the Judaeo-Arabic form).We cannot date the earliest stages of this type of poetry with any precision, or identify its earliest surviving fragments. Its flowering may date back to the Second Temple period, in contexts such as that of the hoshanot that accompanied the ceremonial circling of the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem during the festival of Sukkot (and in later times the circling of the bimah or platform of the synagogue). In any case, there is evidence of a tradition of piyut in Palestine during the amoraic era (3rd–4th c. CE) but this early period is quite obscure. The first paitan that we know of by name is Yosi ben Yosi, generally presumed to have been active during the fifth or sixth century CE.

Piyut was originally intended to replace central portions of the standard synagogue prayers. The early prayers were composed in a spiritually elevated but stylistically simple prose, and although the liturgical formulations were not absolutely fixed in rabbinic times—halakhah concerns itself mostly with fixing the concluding eulogies of the benedictions—they varied only slightly and were probably generally standardized in the prayer services of particular congregations.